


The Torn-Up Road

by sulfuric



Series: Crush [2]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Unrequited Love, bill denbrough is having a Very Bad Time, no clown fuck that bitch, this shit uhhhhh SAD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:21:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27703376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sulfuric/pseuds/sulfuric
Summary: He doesn’t realize that he’s crying until Richie is hovering over him, face mismatched. His eyes are wide, panicked—probably the appropriate response to finding your best friend in the middle of the street at three in the morning—but his mouth gives him away, givesBillaway, in the ugly, familiar downturn, soft with lips parted. It’s pity, and it means that Bill has done this a thousand times and Richie knows exactly what is happening.He pushes Richie off him and rolls away, digging his fingers into the loose gravel. “Go away.”“Bill, you’re gonna get hit by a fucking car.”“Good.”(or: It's been seven years since Georgie went missing, and Bill is in love with his best friend.)
Relationships: Bill Denbrough/Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Series: Crush [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1988767
Comments: 9
Kudos: 35





	The Torn-Up Road

**Author's Note:**

> number two baby! i wanted to post this like weeks ago but i kept forgetting<3 i have applesauce in the place where my brain should be. anyway. if youre new, this fic is heavily inspired by richard siken's _The Torn-Up Road_ cause crush makes me wanna eat glass. little lines and references are all him, but unhinged bichie denbrough grief angst that absolutely no one asked for is all me, baby. have fun?

When Bill finally gets a black eye from Richie, instead of the other way around, it’s an accident. 

He doesn’t realize it’s there until he’s staring it down in the mirror the next morning, headache throbbing oblique and blinding over flashes of limbs tangling together, gravel digging into his shoulders, whines of his name breathed low into the dip of his collarbone.

No, not like that. Unfortunately, not like that.

It’s a Tuesday night, mid-October, storm broiling in the clouds above, thick and grey like ash. They droop low over campus: a threat, in most accurate terms; a mockery, if you’re lying in the middle of the road begging them to tear open and wash you away. Bill is on the ground, a latter sky laughing at him with every low grumble. In this moment, he knows several things:

  1. He is drunk.
  2. He is high.
  3. He is drunk, and high.
  4. He is in the middle of the road, outside his dorm (probably). 
  5. It has been exactly seven years since his brother disappeared.
  6. Starting tomorrow, Georgie will have been dead longer than he was ever alive.
  7. It is his fault. 



He’s not sure what he ran out here to prove, or who he feels he has to prove it to. He knows. He knows, unlike anything he’s even known before, indisputable. He doesn’t have to ask. He used to ask, just to hear the  _ it’s not your fault  _ and the  _ you couldn’t have known  _ over and over and over again. It wasn’t much, but even those three seconds of relief before the truth of it set in again were, back then, enough. It was those nights—high school, study sessions turned sleepovers turned amateur grief counselling—he’d spend shaking apart in his friends arms, waiting for the clouds to clear and the sun to put him back together again.

He grew up. He moved out. He went to college, learned how to compartmentalize. Told people he was an only child. Didn’t talk about it. Didn’t think about it. Found the right script for his therapist to rubber stamp him,  _ This Young Man Is Fine, Now!  _ Maybe he should join Richie’s drama club and perform, not just write for it. Call that a double threat—hell, let’s go for the triple, if you wanna throw pedantry out the window and say the stumbling that got him here (in the road, flat on his back, take a big, stuttering breath for the finish) was actually an interpretive dance. 

_ Bill Denbrough, 1996: A Study In The Movement Of Killing Your Baby Brother. _

He doesn’t realize that he’s crying until Richie is hovering over him, face mismatched. His eyes are wide, panicked—probably the appropriate response to finding your best friend in the middle of the street at three in the morning—but his mouth gives him away, gives  _ Bill  _ away, in the ugly, familiar downturn, soft with lips parted. It’s pity, and it means that Bill has done this a thousand times and Richie knows exactly what is happening. 

He resents it, resents himself, so he pushes Richie off him and rolls away, digging his fingers into the loose gravel. “Go away.”

“Bill, you’re gonna get hit by a fucking car.”

_ At least he’s not coddling me. At least it’s Richie, and not one of the others.  _ “Good.”

Richie rolls his eyes. “C’mon.” He goes for Bill’s shoulders, tries to get his hands underneath to pull him up, but Bill just smacks him, closing his eyes tight to ward off another wave of tears. 

“No.”

“Bill.”

“Just leave me.”

“I’m not going to do that,” Richie mumbles, going in with another attempt as Bill sits up, swearing as his face collides with Richie’s fist, unexpected.

“Augh!” It’s garbled, only half masking the sob that tears out of him as he falls back to the ground, rolling onto his side. It doesn’t hurt, not really, but he knows even in his slow fog that it’ll buy him another few seconds if he acts like he’s in pain.

“Shit, man, I didn’t mean to—” Richie begins an apology, crawling over to Bill before recoils back again, glasses flying off his face and clattering across the road. He gapes, blindly, for a full second before turning back to face Bill, fists up and ready to strike again. “What the fuck, man!?” 

He dodges Richie’s half-hearted, poorly aimed smack and leans back into the ground, staking his claim once more. “Just leave!” he yells, voice both louder and more strained than he was anticipating. It swells up in him again, all at once, grief slamming into him like the sheet of rain that still refuses to come. “Just leave,” he repeats, to himself this time, too drunk to control his whining and too high to resent himself for it.

Everything else, however, is fair game. 

“I’m not leaving,” Richie says, more earnestly than Bill cares to take note of. He’s suddenly hovering over him once more, fumbling at his own chest. Bill squints, trying to see what’s going on, and realizing instead that the streetlamps have begun to sway.  _ That’s a neat new campus feature.  _

“Second pair, bitch.” Richie says then, glasses—not the pair Bill swatted off him, those are still upside down in the dirt by the side of the road, wobbling in the yellow glow of the streetlamps—sitting proudly on his nose as he snaps the case shut, triumphant and percussive. Bill flinches dizzily and watches Richie slide it into the pouch on his chest, mind oscillating between  _ Georgie Georgie Georgie he’s dead he’s not coming back Georgie is dead and it’s your fault  _ and  _ wow look at his fingers look at the zipper that’s a really weird texture I wonder if it could fit my little notebook I should ask him where he got that— _

At some point he realizes the thing Richie’s putting his second(?) glasses case into is a fanny pack, slung across his chest like a sash, like he’s prom king, like he didn’t spend his entire life making fun of Eddie for having one. Bill reaches out to touch it but misses, brushing his fingers against Richie’s instead, heart all but jumping out of his throat and flinging itself across the road to join the discarded glasses when Richie slides their hands together. A strangled sort of noise escapes Bill’s throat then, and he thinks back to the time he punched Richie in the face, halfway through That Summer when Bill dragged them through the sewers and Eddie broke his arm and Richie said  _ let’s face facts  _ and how he didn’t know why it hurt so much coming from  _ him,  _ and how the next winter when Bill turned fourteen Richie told him he was sorry. How Richie told him he was sorry and Bill looked at him like it was the first time, absolutely fucking screwed. How Richie told him he was sorry and Bill looked at him like it was the first time and then Richie said  _ I think I might love Eddie,  _ absolutely fucking screwed. He thinks about how Richie wears a fanny pack because Eddie gave it to him, and how Bill is lying here in the middle of the street, fourteen year old love blooming across his cheekbone in dark, stormy purples, the same kind that just won’t kill him and just won’t let him die. He thinks about how he fell in love at fourteen, how Georgie would be fourteen if he was still alive. Georgie would be fourteen and alive and maybe in love: maybe bruised, maybe zipping a fanny pack. 

But maybe isn’t real, because Georgie is seven and dead and it was Bill who killed him.  __

“I’m not leaving,” Richie says again.

Bill blinks, watery. He takes it back. He wishes it was one of the others, any of the others. “You should. I deserve it.” 

Richie squeezes his hand, Bill fights back the urge to vomit all over him. “It wasn’t your fault, Bill.” His tone is much too soft, much too serious, and Bill finds himself pulling away, rolling over again, face down in the gravel. It smells like rain, and he throws up just a bit, tiny shards of rock sticking to his lips as he gags shallowly. 

Richie says something like “Jesus fucking christ, dude,” but Bill isn’t paying attention because he’s standing in his room again, twelve, watching Richie’s hands twitch out to him, then fall back at his sides.

_ “Is it true?” _

_ “We ch-ch-ch-ch—we looked everywh-where. He’s muh-muh-missing.”  _

_ “Jesus fucking christ, dude.” _

“Bill, please,” Richie pleads, now, in the roiling dark. “you gotta work with me here.” The words register as he feels the tops of his feet—no shoes, no socks, apparently—dragging through the gravel, body limp in Richie’s arms. 

He gasps, soundless, scrambling to drop to the ground and out of Richie’s hold. He can’t think of anything more embarrassing as he crawls backwards in the street, curling in on himself as his knees dig into his own vomit. “Go,” he croaks, getting annoyed again as Richie drops with just as much fervor, the stubborn piece of shit. 

“I’m not fucking going, dipshit!” Richie grunts as he pushes Bill over—easily, the entire world toppling with him—onto his back and straddles him, sitting on his stomach to hold him in place. It sort of hurts his ribs, but Bill likes the feeling. He thinks he might be insane. 

Bill swats blindly up at his face again but Richie is lightning quick (or, more likely, just regular quick, and Bill is trashed) and grabs his wrists, pinning them sharply to the ground above his head. 

Bill snorts, delirious through the tears. “You’re not even gonna take me to dinner first?”

“I will if you get off the fucking street!”

Bill’s mind wanders for a second or two, off on its own, to imagine Richie wining and dining him like some kind of fucked up friends with sugar daddy benefits situation before he deflates, collapsing in on himself. “Nowhere’s open right now,” he sobs, giving up the strain against Richie’s weight. Richie nods numbly, sighing in a way that Bill will only later remember as his composure cracking, terrified. Bill sniffles, tears sitting cold on his cheeks in the wind. “It’s my fault.”

“That restaurants aren’t open at ass ‘o clock on a Tuesday night?” Richie tries. 

Bill hiccups. “I killed him.”

“You didn’t kill him.” 

“I did.”

“You didn’t.”

“Stop,” Bill pleads, ashamed, wanting to hide his face but finding nowhere for it to go, arms still held above his head by Richie’s grip, strong. He doesn’t want to do this anymore, doesn’t want Richie to be here. It’s been so long since he’s let himself think about this, let alone talk about it with his friends. None of them mention that summer anymore—or if they do, they take care not to do it around Bill. He just doesn’t want to do this, doesn’t have the energy to do this, not in front of Richie, who loves him the wrong way and will tell him the wrong things and doesn’t know what it’s like to be responsible for ending a life or loving someone who loves you in every single way but the one you want. He doesn’t have the energy to argue about it and he doesn’t have the heart to make Richie argue about it, so he cries for a little bit longer and eventually settles for a truth they can both agree on:

“I miss him.”

“I know,” he whispers, looking as close to crying as Bill’s seen all night.

Bill looks up at him, rush of contempt surging through him and dying right at the edge of his lips, fizzling out into a ragged exhale.  _ No you don’t,  _ he wants to say,  _ you don’t know any of it.  _

Richie shimmies off of him then, sitting back on his knees, and Bill feels this insane urge to say  _ no, come back,  _ to pull him in by that stupid fucking fanny pack and ruin everything—to be a terrible friend, to say  _ could it have been me, instead?  _ But he doesn’t. He thinks he doesn’t, but if he does, then Richie has the grace not to say anything about it and just pull him up, in for a hug, tight against his chest. Bill melts into it, ashamed and relieved and disgusted and everything else at once, and Richie’s arms are gripping his so tight that Bill can feel the bits of gravel piercing his skin in a hazy, nonfeeling sort of sensation that grounds him, momentarily moored far, far away from the wreckage of his thoughts.

(He is moored, while there are some boats that never came home.)

It’s only when he feels his ass dragging on the ground, seconds or minutes or hours later, that he realizes Richie has moved behind him, pulling him across the road towards the ditch once more.

“No,” Bill protests, squirming weakly in the hold. It’s about a 50/50 shot when it comes to the two of them: both tall, both gangly, and both frankly not very strong in any notable way. But Richie is determined, and Bill is too, but his pursuit of being hit by car is a passive one so Richie does manage to finally deposit their bodies in the shoulder of the road: pressed into the gravel, pressed into the dirt pressed against each other.

Bill has no fight left in him so he decides not to move, waiting for the minutes to stop so he can pass out or die of alcohol poisoning or roll back out under a car or let the storm come and sweep him away, or something, anything to make up for what he’s done. Richie holds him. It’s definitely worse than any of the other options, but there’s nothing he can do but lay there and let it happen. And if he closes his eyes, he can almost pretend it’s for the right reasons—make the record skip and throw himself into another song, another universe. But the gravel is just gravel and there’s a spare inhaler in Richie’s fanny pack that’s digging into Bill’s back and his brother has been dead for seven years. 

The clouds sigh once more, holding out. This week’s headline:  _ Local Storm Plays Seven Year Long Game Of ‘Chicken’ With Suicidal Teen Murderer!  _ He laughs a bit at that, hopes he remembers it in the morning even though he knows he won’t. He’s done this enough times—with the losers, alone, at random frats where he doesn’t know a single person’s name—to know he’ll wake up with a few blurry flashes at most.  _ Breaking News: Campus Faces Rogue Flasher, Alleges He Can’t Remember Doing It.  _

He laughs again but it comes out more like a sob, and Richie holds him tighter. It’s almost terrifying, how easy they both reprise these roles. Bill can feel himself sliding back into his old skin, cramped and all too tight at the edges, the enormity of his own self—nothing but a husk, yet still so  _ full _ —threatening to tear the seams. And then Richie, uncharacteristically quiet and simply just  _ there,  _ presence and the warm line of his body against Bill’s more comforting than any words he could offer.

(In Bill’s house, empty and cold, junior year: Richie showing up at the door, hair soaking wet, a backpack full of junk food and a shrug. “It’s storming,” he’d said, almost nervously. “I thought you might not wanna be alone.”

Neither of them had said much after that, Bill not entirely sure for what reason he’d spent the better part of the night crying into Richie’s shirt. All he knew is that he felt wrong for wishing—well, not quite  _ wishing,  _ but  _ thinking  _ of wishing, maybe, for even letting the thought cross his mind—for it to rain just a bit more often, so he could have a reason to lie with Richie like that again, waking up warm the next morning, cradled into his friend’s chest.)

This time, he wakes up back in his dorm, shivering and alone.

And so it goes, naturally, that we arrive once more at the bathroom mirror: Bill inspects the bruises on his body, runs his fingers over the fading indents on the backs of his arms, reels unsteady at the echo of Richie’s voice—and promptly vomits into the bowl of the sink, doubling over just as a stranger with a shower caddy scoffs and turns on their heel, leaving Bill to contend with his mess alone. 

It’s what he wanted, after all. 

Well, it’s not, not really, but it is if he can’t have that other thing. 

(He’s compartmentalizing.)

He’s letting the water run, washing it away. He’s pressing a finger to the tender skin of his eyelid, watching it turn white. He’s waiting for rain. In the meantime, he’s standing at the sink and watching himself, alive, ignoring the texts he wishes he had (parents) and wishes he didn’t (Richie). He looks at his hands, shaking, illuminated in thin strips by the dusty morning light, warmth reminding him he’s here, he’s alive, he’s the wrong one— 

We don’t think about that. We don’t think about that. Who’s we? It’s him, it’s Georgie, it’s Richie, it’s everyone, it’s no one. Who cares. We don’t think about that. This Young Man Is Fine. This Young Man Is A Triple Threat. This Young Man Is Not A Murderer, And He Is Not In Love With His Best Friend That’s Dating His Other Best Friend. 

He has nothing to prove. He knows. 

The rain never came. It’s Wednesday. He stands at the sink and watches himself throw water on his face, a mockery of the real thing. The water is cold, and clean, and not really soothing, but soothing nonetheless.

**Author's Note:**

> that shit: hurted. yell at me in a comment if you feel like it?
> 
> [tumblr](https://losersclub3000.tumblr.com/) / [twitter](https://twitter.com/losersclub3000)


End file.
